Not His Bride by Tessa Kelwyn
Not His Bride
Description
Two hundred guests. One missing groom. And a set of photos that turned Odette Marsden from a bride into a headline. She destroyed him before the ink on the wedding invitations dried. Then she vanished-new town, new name, a pub by the harbour, and a secret she can't outrun. But Liam Ashford isn't the kind of man who stops looking. And the sister who held Odette's hand through the worst night of her life? She's still calling. Some lies only survive as long as no one comes looking for the truth.
Chapter 1
May 7, 2026
[Odette’s POV]
He’s not coming. Liam is not coming to his own wedding. Is he?
The string quartet is on their third pass through Pachelbel's Canon, which means either the violinist has lost count or the universe has. Two hundred faces angle toward the back of the church like sunflowers waiting on a sun that isn't coming.
My bouquet weighs about the same as a small dog. I am gripping it so hard my knuckles have gone past white into a colour I didn't know my hands could make.
"He's probably just caught in traffic," my aunt Marianne stage-whispers from the third pew, and nobody in this church believes in traffic the way they believe in excuses.
I keep smiling, because smiling is the load-bearing wall of this operation. Seven minutes, and behind my sternum a small door has started to rattle, and if it opens inside this church I will not survive.
"Odette, come with me, just for a minute, please." Celine's hand on my elbow, her eyes already wet, her voice trying very hard not to panic.
I let her lead me through to the bridal suite, my feet working even when the rest of me is renegotiating its lease on my body.
The door clicks shut, and the quartet keeps playing on the other side of it, muffled and polite. Celine is still holding my hand, and her hand is shaking, and so is mine. I usually love our combined sisterly emotional response to things, it’s so natural and cute, even if she’s adopted, but not right now.
"Sit down, Odette, please sit down." Her face has gone a kind of white that makes her freckles look drawn on, and she is gripping my fingers like she's afraid I'll float away.
I sit. The dress pools around me, and Celine drops to her knees in front of me.
"I got something an hour ago, and I kept hoping it was a prank." She is crying now, properly, her palm pressed over her mouth. Her crying face has always upset me, but right now I’m too frozen and confused to react. "Odette, I am so sorry."
She turns her phone toward me with hands that aren't steady enough to hold it level. The first photo is a hotel room, judging by how generically fancy it looks.
There is a swan lamp in this photo, and a suit crumpled on the floor—the navy one with the grey lining, the one he wore last night toasting me, saying I was the best thing that ever happened to him.
And there is Liam. Shoulder bare, face half-turned into a pillow, the small black mark on his deltoid I have kissed so many times I could draw it blind.
Okay. Okay. It’s creepy that somebody took a photo of him sleeping, and why is he half-naked, and did he sleep through our wedding? Ridiculous, right?
"There's more, I'm sorry," Celine whispers, and she swipes for me because my hand has stopped knowing how to do that. Another photo, a woman's back, the curve of her spine, her hair spilling forward so her face is a rumor.
Between her shoulder blades, tiny enough that I have to squint, is a tattoo. The room goes far away, the quartet and the carpet and the swan lamp all receding, a ringing in my ears like a kettle too long on the hob.
Taste of metal. Pressure in my chest that has found a gap between two ribs and settled there, and a sound trying to climb up my throat that I catch behind my teeth before it gets out.
"Odette, look at me, please, I'm right here," Celine says, her hands on both of mine now, her tears falling hot onto my knuckles. If I look at her properly I will come apart, and there are two hundred people on the other side of a wall.
If I cry now I will not stop, and if I do not stop I will die inside this church. So I do the other thing—my face goes still, because stillness is a shape I can hold, and something behind my eyes goes cold the way metal goes cold in winter.
"How long ago." My voice is not my voice. It is a woman ordering an Uber on a Tuesday afternoon, and it is the only voice I have left.
"What?" Celine blinks up at me, bewildered, and I cannot explain because explaining would take breath I do not have.
"You said an hour ago—tap the photo, check the metadata." My hands have started a tremor I can't stop, so I put them under my thighs and sit on them.
Her thumb moves over the screen. "Three fourteen this morning, Odette—" and she does not finish, because there is nothing at the end of the sentence to say.
I was in our bed at three fourteen this morning, writing him a note to find on the pillow when he woke up. Still pinned under a mug, with three hearts I drew in purple pen because he liked purple pens.
"Thank you," I say, and it comes out flat, because everything warm in me has folded up and gone somewhere safer. "Just give me a minute."
"Let me stay, please, let me— "
"A minute, Cel." She nods, presses a kiss to my forehead the way our mother used to, and goes, and the door clicks.
I do not cry. Something in my chest is caving and something else is hardening over it, and I cannot tell whether I am breaking or fossilising, only that doing is the only substitute I have left for feeling.
I take out my phone, and Gemma picks up on the second ring with, "Ode, aren't you supposed to be getting married right now?"
"I have a story for you—Liam Ashford, Archer and Cole, caught cheating hours before the ceremony." My voice from three feet outside my body. "Photos, timestamp three fourteen this morning."
"Jesus, Ode, babe, where are you, are you—"
"His best man was at the bachelor party, Matt Reeve, senior analyst, sandy hair, run it before four." I enunciate every word, not for Gemma’s sake, but because she’s a journalist, and journalists appreciate preciseness, and because otherwise I’ll just break down.
A long pause, the newsroom behind her, a keyboard, a man laughing about fantasy football. "Ode, are you—sure?"
I am sure of nothing except the mark on his deltoid and the shape of his shoulders when he's asleep, and I cannot say that aloud. "Gemma." That is the whole sentence, and after a beat she exhales, okay, I'm on it, and the line cuts.
I stand, walk through the suite, out the small door to the gravel car park, and the light is obscene—white and hot and ordinary, as if nothing has happened.
Nobody sees me. Two hundred people are facing the wrong direction, still watching a door that isn't going to open, and my car starts on the first try like it has no idea what kind of day it is.
London traffic lets me through like it has read the room. I don't remember the drive, only the lift, and the key in our front door, the particular way it sticks if you don't lift the handle first.
I lift the handle without thinking, because muscle memory is the last thing to go. The flat smells like his aftershave and the coffee he made at seven this morning, and it is this—not the photos, not the lamp, not the tattoo—that nearly takes me down.
My knees go. I grip the edge of the counter until my fingernails hurt, and on the island there is a mug with my lipstick on the rim and his fingerprint on the handle. I make a sound I don't recognize, once, short, and swallow the rest.
One bag. Jeans, two jumpers, the toothbrush, the laptop, the notebook. I pick up the note I left him last night—three purple hearts, my loopy handwriting, love you—and for four full seconds I cannot make my fingers let it go.
I let it go. I pull the front door shut, get into the car, turn the key. In the second before the engine catches—the back of that woman, the small dark shape between her shoulder blades—something in me tilts sideways.
I have seen that shape before. I don't know where, but I have seen it before, and I have a feeling that I will not like the answer if I remember it.
Not His Bride
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